The Shattered Mirror

Popular images of women in Mexicoconveyed through literature and, more recently, film and televisionwere long restricted to either the stereotypically submissive wife and mother or the demonized fallen woman. But new representations of women and their roles in Mexican society have shattered the ideological mirrors that reflected these images. This book explores this major change in the literary representation of women in Mexico. Mara Elena de Valds enters into a selective and hard-hitting examination of literary representation in its social context and a contestatory engagement of both the literary text and its place in the social reality of Mexico. Some of the topics she considers are Carlos Fuentes and the subversion of the social codes for women; the poetic ties between Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz and Octavio Paz; questions of female identity in the writings of Rosario Castellanos, Luisa Josefina Hernndez, Mara Luisa Puga, and Elena Poniatowska; the Chicana writing of Sandra Cisneros; and the postmodern celebrationwithout reprobationof being a woman in Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate.